Saturday, April 9, 2011

An Essential Guide To SEOing Your WordPress Blog

By Luke Jones


Many people like me will tell you time and time again that you need to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines, but that is all talk without explanation. That said, I am going to take some time today to teach you about how to do just that. Make your WordPress blog much more search engine friendly.

First off, I need to answer a question. Why do it? Simple. The search engines are the oldest, and still most reliable source of highly targeted traffic on the internet. If you rank for a keyword, then people will visit your site when searching for that keyword. Naturally, the higher that you rank, the larger the share of that traffic.

Of course, there is even more logic in choosing the right keywords, but this in itself is a separate topic worth learning.

Here's How To SEO Your WordPress Blog

Before I teach you how to optimize your blog, I need to make a recommendation that you learn how to copy wordpress blogs, so that if the need arises, you can easily implement this across more domains. It is a worthwhile skill to have.

There are many freely available plugins available for the WordPress platform, needless to say, that is exactly what this process relies on. Most of tehse plugins are available for free from WordPress, and can be installed from the backend interface of your blog quite easily. Again, further emphasis on why you need to know how to clone wordpress, as this can become a lengthy process.

All In One SEO Pack is a great starting point, which once installed, will allow you to set custom meta tags on your blog such as your titles and descriptions. You will need to do some basic keyword research first though, just to make sure that your chosen keywords are actually winnable and targeted. This will make you more likely to rank for that phrase in the search engines, plus you can also tell people why they need to visit your page as well.

Next, you are going to need something to submit to Google Webmaster Tools so that they can be aware of any changes to your website. I am talking about a standard sitemap file. Lucky for you, this can easiy be created using a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This allows for easy creation of an XML file that the search engines can easily index and refer to when updating their index. An essential task that many actually miss out on.

The most important factor is the abilit to be able to track and monitor your traffic. This can be done using Google Analytics. To install Google Analytics, you will need to create a profile for your blog, and install the supplied tracking code on your blog. Usually not an easy task, however a free plugin called Google Analyticator makes light work of this. This plugin works using Google's back end authentication server, and automaticaly adds any code needed.

Now, I know that the last point was not specificaly about SEO, but it is equally as important. The ability to measure where your traffic is coming from, and how much traffic you are getting is of huge importance if you want to improve your traffic.

Don't Lose Sight!

SEO is arguably one of the most important skills that you can ever have, especially if you are an Internet marketer. It is a high in demand skill to have, and can save you costs, especially if you dont want to invest in running expensive AdWords campaings, or worse.

It is with this in mind that you need to consider SEO in your overall strategy. The more you practice, the easier it will become. With the use of the above WordPress plugins, it will all fall into place for you easily enough.




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